I just wish he would have hammered this message into the Newhouse newspapers–especially our local beast I lovingly call “The Retreat,” before he left the shed for greener grazing:

The irony is that the editorialists have long been guilty of the sins most often attributed to bloggers: They rarely report and mostly just leach off the work of other journalists. And they work anonymously. Worse, they attempt to speak as the voices of institutions, issuing opinions as if from the mountaintop. But today, we do not trust institutions. We are impatient with lectures. We demand to speak eye-to-eye as humans. We require conversation. The form of the editorial is as outmoded as its medium. News organizations should no longer define themselves by the ink on their paper. And publishers may no longer assume the prerogative of telling us what to think just because they buy that ink by the barrel. Now we all have our barrels of bits.

It follows a riff I have been jamming for only God knows how long when arguing with people about media, especially our local yokels:

Who knighted them–especially “married rich” shits like the Diamond family and syncho-fat asses like Hanley and his double surnamed idiot deputy editor–as the Voice of Me, or this Community? Who gave Brian Laline the right to speak for you and me while refusing to speak about what really is making us pitch a fit… or worse, blowing us off as if we were unenlightened pieces of shit?

The advertisers and the local politcos that all those working down on Fingerboard Road editorially are scared shitless to confront, that’s who. And they will beat the shit out of anyone trying to compete against their monopoly soapbox.